An actual serpent with feet is an image that belongs to a prelapsarian world. It’s a mythical reminder of original sin, and perhaps a symbol of lost potential, fallibility, desire, and all sorts of biblical things good and bad. It’s a hell of a name for a musical project, coded with all the grandeur and primordial muck of the Book of Genesis. serpentwithfeet is Josiah Wise, a classically trained singer who’s moved nomadically between neo-soul, funk, R&B, and a self-described style of pagan gospel—he finds refuge, takes lessons, and moves on. On his debut EP, *blisters *he’s enlisted Björk collaborator and producer the Haxan Cloak to help craft a world that boils with personal energy and is fantastically operatic in scale.
*blisters *is a brief five-song EP, barely over 20 minutes long, but it’s gorgeously multivalent and strangely wrought, morphing that short timespan into an experience that is unabashedly vulnerable and powerfully queer. Its opening title track sounds simultaneously ancient and postmodern. Harps share space with thunderous electronic drums and belches of static creating a whirlpool of sounds that seems totally inhospitable until Wise’s voice threads it all together. A combination of spooky processing and classical inflections make his voice so affecting: shifting between whispers and moans, splitting off, multiplying, and taking root in your ears in such strange ways.
The way his voice is used reminds me of Holly Herndon’s vocal experiments. It’s protean and malleable, at any time diffuse or concrete, and serves as the album’s most powerful instrument. In the following track “flickering,” Wise continues this experimentation by dissolving almost all instrumentation, and allowing his voice to luxuriate in its own timbre. It’s easy to get hypnotized by Wise’s singing, which borders on glossolalia in terms of its pounding spirituality, but when his words connect, they resonate right in the chest. On “flickering” in particular, Wise loves the melodrama (“I’m starting to feel the cord connecting us two is made of gossamer”), but he sells it by virtue of his delivery, thumbing the scale with emotional weight. When he says, “Don’t let me doubt you,” or, “I offer myself to you,” the pain goes from his mouth to your heart in a flash.
It works because his music is theatrical. It demands you to sit down and pay attention. In particular, blisters invests in the megachurch and the opera, always looking for a safe landing between dogma and drama, faith and obsession. In songs like “four ethers” he leans into the glory of these forms. The song hangs on a motif of swirling atmospheric strings that are less Wagner or Puccini, but more like Hans Zimmer in effect, and it’s incredible if not a little cheesy. It works together with the tone of the song’s lyrics which are puncturing but somehow funny and self-mocking (“Your name is about as easy to remember as the four ethers/And who the hell knows the four ethers”).
He’s also direct, visceral, and imagistic, recalling Frank Ocean’s knack for storytelling circa-Channel Orange: “Babe I know you learned some fucked up shit from your mother/Had you tucking your dick/Had you hiding the shit that really made you special.” He delivers these lines with a lilting falsetto, as Haxan Cloak’s noises and screeches of strings explode around him. In these personal disclosures of desire, sexuality, and failure, Wise can make individual and personal struggles seem mythic.
In addition to his subtly haunting textures, Haxan Cloak also makes Wise sound swaggering and enormous. It’s because Wise has intent and vision as he explores the difficulties of identity and the liquidity of the queer experience with a sly sense of humor. Listening to *blisters, *I was reminded of the bittersweet optimism of the theorist José Esteban Muñoz, who wrote, “Queerness should and could be about a desire for another way of being in both the world and time.” In *blisters, *Wise pauses to examine the ugliness of our world, then floats right past it to another way of being.
